i’ve recently (as in the past month or so) been discovering feeds. a friend of mine mentioned them about a year or so ago, but i didn’t have the application that caused them to be rendered as anything other than plain text, which meant an XML document or something like that, instead of a rendered page. then i upgraded to a new operating system a few weeks ago, and the old standard, Kmail, which has been my email client for almost 10 years now, has been integrated into a new application called Kontact, which is a combination of Kmail, Korganizer, Kaggregator, Kontacts and a few other things which i don’t use, such as the K groupware suite, and other suchlike things. the legacy standard is RSS which stands for Really Simple Syndication, and the newer standard is Atom, and it is apparently a series of HTML or other SGML-child documents, the XML documents that represent them, and a little client-side reader that goes and fetches those XML documents on a regular basis. basically it’s just like your “Friends” list on livejournal, except that it updates itself automatically, and you can “subscribe” to more than just livejournal stuff. it makes me wonder why i stayed at livejournal for as long as i did…